


No Energy Created, None Destroyed

by AchillesMonkey



Series: Child Fitz Fics [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Britpicked to the best of my ability, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kid Fic, Leo Fitz Feels, Leo Fitz Needs a Hug, Leo Fitz loves monkeys, Mention of Death, interesting monkey facts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-09 23:45:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8918305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AchillesMonkey/pseuds/AchillesMonkey
Summary: "Well, my mum always said that you shouldn't be afraid because it's just like the way life was before you were born... which wasn't that bad, was it?"After his Nana dies, Leo has some questions for his Mummy.





	

Leopold Fitz was seven-years-old and a very clever boy. He knew a lot of things. He knew how to do complicated maths in his head, and how to read books meant for students in secondary school. He knew how to repair broken appliances (though Mummy usually told him off whenever he did so—something about it being dangerous). He knew that they didn’t have a lot of money, and that Mummy had to work at a job during the day, and a different job on the weekends. He knew that most of the other kids had a Mum and a Da, but he just had a Mummy and a Nana.

There were some things that Leopold Fitz didn’t know. He didn’t know how to play football. He didn’t know how to ride a bicycle. He didn’t know why the other kids laughed at him and called him an anorak when he tried to tell them about how awesome monkeys were. He didn’t know how to make friends. He didn’t know that people died.

Nana was supposed to pick him up from school. She’d never been late before. She was always there at exactly 3pm, and they would walk to the flat where they lived, and Nana would listen as he told her all about the interesting monkey facts he’d learnt that day while the other children learnt their multiplication tables (which Leopold had memorized when he was three). When they reached home, Nana would make him a snack, and he’d eat it, and then she’d take him to the park where he would clamber all over the climbing frame pretending he was a monkey. That was their routine.

It was half four now, according to the clock on the wall in the front office. The grown-ups were on the phone, trying to ring his Nana or his Mummy. They ignored Leo as he sat there chewing on his fingers and thinking about how he wanted to tell Nana all about how spider monkeys have prehensile tails and no thumbs. Where was she? He was hungry. He wanted to go to the park and pretend he was a monkey.

Mrs. Campbell, who lived in the flat next door, arrived at 3:47pm. She smiled at Leo, but he was too busy thinking of the name of every type of monkey that he knew to pay any attention to her. “Hello, Leopold,” she said, coming over and squatting down in front of him. “Your Mummy asked me to take you to the park to play. Won’t that be fun?”

“Where’s Nana?” Leo asked, eyes fixed on the clock on the wall where the minute hand moved to make the time 3:48pm. He stood up and put his schoolbag over his shoulder.

“What do you like to do at the park?” Mrs. Campbell asked him, avoiding his question. He was used to grown-ups not being able to answer him, because he tended to ask very difficult questions, but he didn’t think ‘where’s Nana’ was a very difficult question at all.

“Where’s Nana?” he repeated.

“Did you learn anything interesting at school today?” Mrs. Campbell avoided his question again.

He huffed in annoyance, but he really did want to tell someone about spider monkeys, so he started explaining about how they use their prehensile tail to swing through the trees and to balance when they walk instead of their arms like other monkeys.

“Oh, look,” Mrs. Campbell exclaimed when they reached the park, pointing out an ice cream van. “Would you like an ice cream, Leopold?”

“Yes,” Leo answered before continuing his monologue about spider monkeys as they walked over to the van.

“We’ll have two 99s with monkey’s blood,” Mrs. Campbell told the ice cream man.

“—and they eat nuts, and fruits, and leaves, and—” Leo stopped talking as he registered what Mrs. Campbell had told the ice cream man. _Monkey’s blood?_ He stared in horror at the ice cream she held out to him, at the red sauce drizzled on it, and promptly burst into tears as he knocked it out of her hand and onto the ground. “No!” he wailed, turning and running to hide behind the nearest tree. _Where was Nana? She would never give him anything that had monkey’s blood on it!_

“Leopold, what’s wrong?” Mrs. Campbell asked, coming over to the tree and staring at him.

It took a few minutes for Leo to calm down enough to be understood. “I don’t want to eat monkey’s blood!” he told her, wiping his eyes with his sleeve and sniffing. “They shouldn’t be taking blood from monkeys; a lot of them are endangered!”

Mrs. Campbell started laughing. Leo didn’t know why; he hadn’t said anything funny. “Oh, no, no, love, it’s not _real_ monkey’s blood,” she told him. “It’s just what they call raspberry sauce. Oh, you poor wee boy, no wonder you were so upset.”

Mrs. Campbell ended up buying him an orange-flavored ice lolly, which he ate while sitting on a swing, watching the clouds above him. An aeroplane flew by overhead and he thought about how maybe one day he’d fly on an aeroplane and go to South America to see a capuchin monkey in the wild and not behind bars like at the zoo.

He was at the top of the climbing frame some time later when he spotted his Mummy arrive at the park and make her way to Mrs. Campbell who was sitting on a bench nearby. He climbed down as quickly as possible and ran over to her, throwing his arms around her waist. “Mummy!”

“Hello, darling,” she said, but her voice sounded funny. Leo looked up and noticed that her eyes were red and a bit wet like she’d been crying.

“Mummy?” he asked, suddenly feeling scared.

“Have a seat, love,” she told him, sitting down on the bench. “I have something I need to tell you.”

“I’ll just be going then,” Mrs. Campbell said, a bit too loudly. Leo put his hands over his ears.

“Thank you for taking care of my Leo, Aileen,” Mummy told her.

“Of course, Ellie, he’s a lovely wee boy.”

Mrs. Campbell walked away and Mummy turned to Leo, smiling at him, but her eyes still looked sad. Leo didn’t like it. “Mummy, Mrs. Campbell tried to give me monkey’s blood. Only, it wasn’t real monkey’s blood, it’s just what she called the raspberry sauce, but I thought it was real and I didn’t want to eat monkey’s blood, so I got an orange ice lolly instead. Why didn’t Nana come for me?”

Mummy took a deep breath before answering. “Leopold, Nana died.”

“Died? What’s died?”

“Yes, darling. It means that her body stopped working. It happens when you get old like Nana.”

Leopold frowned. He was a very clever boy—Mummy often called him a genius—but for some reason, he couldn’t wrap his brain around the idea that Nana had had a working body just that morning when she’d taken him to school, and now her body no longer worked. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s all right, love,” she told him, wrapping her arms around him in a hug. He rested his head against her chest, listening for her heartbeat. _Does ‘died’ mean Nana doesn’t have a heartbeat anymore?_

“I want to go home,” he told Mummy.

They walked back to the flat in silence. Leopold couldn’t even think of any interesting monkey facts to tell his Mummy. It was like they had all disappeared from his brain.

The flat was quiet and dark when they entered. Leo automatically looked at the armchair Nana always sat in, but it was empty. He let go of Mummy’s hand and hurried back to Nana’s bedroom, but it was empty too.

“Mummy, where’s Nana?” he asked, going to find his Mummy who was sitting at the kitchen table looking through his schoolbag at the work he’d completed that day.

“Some men came and took her body away,” Mummy explained. “When someone dies, their body stops working, so we have a funeral, and the body is placed in a coffin and buried underground.”

 _Underground? But, Nana doesn’t belong underground. She belongs in the flat, with him and Mummy._ “No,” he said, shaking his head. He felt tears coming to his eyes.

“It’s what happens when people die, Leo,” Mummy said.

“NO!” Leo shouted. He turned and ran to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

He started with his bed, yanking the green duvet off and throwing it to the floor. The bottom sheet and his pillows soon followed. Next, he turned to his desk, knocking everything on it to the floor. He pulled his books off of his bookshelf, upended his tub of Lego, and then started kicking at the mess on the floor. Once he’d finally exhausted his anger, he sank down into the pile of bedclothes and found the monkey Nana had given him when he was just a baby. He called it Henry and it was his most favorite toy ever. He held it close as he lay there, and chewed on Henry’s ears as he felt the blood pulsing in his head begin to slow as he calmed down.

That was how Mummy found him later: on the floor in the middle of his destruction, chewing his monkey’s ears. “Oh, Leo,” she said, stepping over the mess as best she could and sitting down next to him. He climbed onto her lap and rested his head against her breast, listening for her heartbeat.

“Nana hasn’t got a heartbeat anymore, has she, Mummy?”

“No, she doesn’t, darling.”

“I don’t want to put Nana in the ground, Mummy. It’s dark and icky. She’ll be frightened.”

“Oh, love, Nana won’t know that she’s in the ground. It’s just her body that’s going into the ground. Her mind went somewhere else.”

“Her mind? Where did it go?”

“Yes. Once you die, your mind,” she tapped his forehead, “and your body,” she tapped his chest, “separate. And people have a lot of different ideas about what happens to your mind after you die. Some people—church people—think that the mind goes to live with God. Other people think that your mind doesn’t go anywhere, you just stop knowing. I think that when you die, your mind goes back to doing whatever it was doing before you were born. Do you remember what it was like before you were born, Leo?”

Leo did his best to think back and remember, but he couldn’t remember anything. “No.”

“So, you don’t have to be scared, see? If you can’t remember what it was like before you were born, then it can’t have been bad at all, can it? You always remember bad things, right?”

Leo nodded. “So Nana’s somewhere nice?”

“I think so.”

“And she’s not frightened?”

“No.”

“Can she still hear us? And see us?”

“I don’t know, love. Maybe.”

“Are you going to die, Mummy?”

“Everybody dies someday, Leo. But most people don’t die until they’re very old, like Nana was.”

“How old was Nana?”

“74.”

“That’s 67 years older than me.” Leo stated. “How old are you, Mummy?”

“I’m 35.”

“So, you’ll live for 39 more years?”

“Well, I may not die when I’m 74 like Nana. Sometimes people die when they’re even older than Nana, and sometimes people die when they’re younger. But most people die when they’re older.”

“Can we have pizza for tea?” Leo asked, standing up and putting Henry back on the bed.

“That sounds like a good idea, love,” Mummy said. “I’ll go order it. Will you work on cleaning this mess up while we wait for it, please?”

Leo nodded, looking around at the mess he’d created. Sometimes he just got really angry and needed to destroy things until he felt better. Sometimes Mummy would get cross and shout at him because of it, but Nana never had. She’d just held him and told him everything would be all right.

“Everything will be all right, Nana,” he murmured as he began putting his Lego back in the tub where it stayed. “You’re just back where you started. That’s what Mummy says. Maybe there are monkeys there. I learnt about spider monkeys today, Nana . . .”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you everyone for reading! Thanks to those who leave kudos/comments! Feel free to check out my [Tumblr](http://unlessimwrongwhichyouknowimnot.tumblr.com)


End file.
